Can We Please Treat LGBTQ People as Humans Already?
Can We Please Treat LGBTQ People as Humans Already?
Obergefell was only eight years ago this month. We're already backsliding into the worst of the Gay Panic.
I was a child of the Eighties. I remember, slowly but surely, gaining an awareness of AIDS from the evening news, and then, a little after my seventh birthday, The Ryan White Story, a made for TV movie about an ostracized teen who contracted AIDS through blood transfusions, appeared on ABC. A year later, White would die just short of his graduation, and that would also make the news. It was a discussion topic in social studies the following year, using one of those Scholastic News articles that were distributed at schools. In middle school, as one of those “ahead of their years” kids that consumed news religiously, I remember Bill Clinton trying to end the ban on LGBTQ people in the military and ended up with an uproar. I know I thought then that I didn’t understand the big deal. I was shy about changing for gym class! Didn’t everyone feel weird changing clothes and underwear with other people around? I didn’t understand the big deal and I didn’t like that people were being treated differently for their physical and romantic attractions.
I will take a brief aside to mention that friends of mine then, some of whom I’ve stayed in touch with, came out as adults, and I can only imagine what they went through back then feeling as they did. Perhaps it’s because I was involved in theater that it feels like a high percentage of my childhood friends are LGBTQ, I can’t say I know the numbers, but I never had an inkling of it then, and I understand why they hid it.
Moving on. It wasn’t until high school and college that I learned about the “gay panic” behind AIDS, how politicians were slow to act on it, how it was called the “gay cancer” early on, and it was the mid-to-late 90s & early 2000s by then. There was a push to grant marriage rights to LGBTQ people, and some states adopted the “civil unions” formulation so LGBTQ people could have the same civil rights as married heterosexual couples. In the midst of this, the 9/11 attacks took place, and days later, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson went on The 700 Club, where this exchange occurred:
Falwell: “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularise America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”
Robertson: “I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government.”
President George W. Bush condemned that statement then, but then when he needed the help of people who think that way, he got behind the push to pass a constitutional amendment to ban marriage for non-heterosexual couples. Again, the backsliding. Again, LGBTQ people being used as pawns for politics, when they just want to live an everyday life. In 2006, I was managing retail in Los Angeles, and for the only time in my retail life, used my conscience clause and refused to print a Focus on the Family mailer railing against civil rights for LGBTQ people. I showed the man (about my age at that time) how to use the self-serve to do it, but I was not going to do it myself. I then used my lunch break to go outside with him and engage him on why he was wrong, and to his credit, he listened. It seemed like he’d gotten indoctrinated on the issue and hadn’t known the history of marriage or LGBTQ people. I thought later it was a good sign that progress was possible, but California, a state widely considered liberal, passed Prop 8 in 2008, implementing a gay marriage ban. I had moved back to Michigan some months before that happened, and remember being really saddened by that vote. Within a few years, though, enough pressure and change in individual states put the matter before the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges, and in 2015, marriage equality was declared a constitutional right by the Court. It was a tremendous victory, and I thought equal rights would only become easier now that this very large hurdle was normalized. Unfortunately, it hasn’t.
The past year and change has seen an organized war on trans people, the “T” in LGBTQ, led by the worst people you know in conservative politics. Helium breather Ben Shapiro, child marriage advocate Matt Walsh, Charlie Kirk from neo-fascist Turning Point USA, Senator Marsha Blackburn (so egregious a woman that Taylor Swift recorded ads to support her opponent that year), Newsmax, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham. It started by slurring teachers and librarians as “groomers” for the sin of teaching kids to be respectful of each other. Then came the legislation banning trans people from certain types of medical care and removing all sorts of “woke” books from schools and libraries, and then the boycott of Bud Light for creating one special commemorative can for a trans woman, Dylan Mulvaney, used in one single sponsored Instagram post. It was like, $1000 of ad budget being used to help support already falling sales. It’s turned into a multi-month boycott with Kid Rock shooting up cases of Bud Light with an AR-15 and other conservative types using bulldozers or large pickups to run over Bud Light because they ran a single Instagram ad with a trans person. Overreaction much?
There is an orchestrated rage on the right ever since Donald Trump lost in 2020. The failed insurrection, the unhinged rants at school board meetings about masks for COVID and CRT (which was ginned up by a right-wing operative, Chris Rufo, on purpose, as a way to “get back at the left.”), and then the 2022 version of the 1982 gay panic, also started by Rufo. Rufo has been rewarded for his efforts by getting a seat on the board of regents at Florida’s New College, where Ron DeSantis used Rufo’s work to launch his presidential ambitions by destroying education in the state. If you don’t believe me, Rufo proudly tweeted about all of this, and now says he’ll help fire any professor that teaches any “woke” concepts at the New College.
Now, thanks to Matt Walsh, one of Shapiro’s lieutenants (and aforementioned advocate for child marriage and reducing the age of consent—but that’s not grooming, it’s just ‘Biblical’), the rage has hit Target. Target has pivoted over the past decade from a company that supported efforts to hinder equal rights to a very LGBTQ-friendly store. This year, their Pride Month merchandise featured a lot of cringe items (although, honestly, I thought the coffee mug that reads “Genderfluid” was pretty funny), and then a swimsuit for trans women that, in the description’s fine print, states that it has some extra fabric in the genital region to disguise if they have male genitalia. Walsh’s band of merry goons did some selective video editing to make it appear as if this swimsuit was made for kids in an effort to “further their grooming into becoming transgender Satanists” and I wish I were making this up but it’s all too real. A variety of people across the country responded to this lie with violence. They went into Target stores and started making scenes, pushing workers, knocking over displays, and ranting about groomers. In many areas of the country, Target removed some displays and put others in the back of the store. Walsh claimed victory.
I know this is running long, and I hope you’ve stayed with me, because there’s one burning question that the media has been afraid to answer, and that too many normal people have not been willing to engage in.
Why are so many people afraid of standing up against organized hate?
The people behind this want an America that is whitewashed. They want to erase Black history, they want to erase equal rights for women, they want to erase anyone who is not male, straight and “Christian.” I use quote marks because Jesus would’ve thrown these people out if they claimed to be his followers behaving as they do. Mallory McMorrow, who was our state senator until we moved, gave a brilliant speech about this last year. She was called a groomer because she is white, straight and Christian, but refused to give in to the parade of hate. We need more to act in the same manner.
The Jesus I learned about and believe in was pretty specific about what was needed to follow Him. It didn’t include executing someone for a sin. It didn’t include a word about homosexuality. It didn’t include a word about abortion. What did it include, though?
Love your neighbor as yourself
The wealthy need to give that wealth to those in need
Someone who worships privately is preferable to those who loudly proclaim their faith in public, for the latter often do not practice that faith in private
If your brother strikes you, offer the other cheek. Do not strike him back.
He treated women equally, regardless of their station in life, and it was women who were the first to bear witness to the Resurrection.
He specifically taught a parable about a Samaritan (a race looked down upon by Israelites) helping the victim of violence at the side of the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, after a rabbi and a Levite (a member of a “higher” tribe in the Israelite hierarchy) both ignored the man’s pleas for help.
Despite this, despite the actual words of Jesus, right-wing pastors, writers, and politicians have twisted His Gospel into something meaner and nastier. They indoctrinate followers to believe that LGBTQ people are going to Hell automatically. They teach “prosperity gospel,” which somehow only ends up with the pastor being extremely wealthy and everyone else doing the same as before. They once claimed Christ supported slavery and segregation, when it’s abundantly clear that He was not that guy. Jesus said in John 13:34-35, “A new commandment I give to you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all know that ye are disciples of mine, if ye have love amongst yourselves.”
LGBTQ people are human beings. They are not beneath us. Every time the Right takes rights away from them, every time the Right demonizes them, every time conservatives try to slowly but surely erase them from public life, and the rest of us don’t speak up and say NO, we are not shining some light on the supposed danger they carry to society. We’re just spotlighting our failure to be good people. For anyone who claims the mantle of Christ, He said that the world will know us by our love for each other. What is happening is not love. It is Hate. Hate is evil. Hate destroys everything around it. Hate is destroying the human race right now as it spreads once more around the world, and if it is not defeated, it will come for the rest of us. Hate is easy. Love is hard. What good is our life if we just take the easy way out?